As more of the world's population moves into an urban environment, battles that are fought in urban areas will also increase. Therefore, soldiers must train for the possibility of having to enter buildings, positively distinguish between friend or foe, and act accordingly. Such training is also needed for law enforcement as well as private security companies. The current shift in doctrine toward more and better urban training for U.S. military, law enforcement and private security personnel is a direct result of the increase in number of armed conflicts and perceived threats in urban environments.
Urban combat is very different from combat in the open at both the operational and tactical level. Complicating factors in urban warfare are the presence of civilians and buildings of all sorts. Some civilians may be difficult to distinguish from combatants such as armed militias and gangs, particularly if individuals are trying to protect their homes. Tactics are complicated by a three-dimensional environment, limited field of view and field of fire because of buildings, enhanced concealment and cover for defenders, below ground infrastructure, and the ease of placement of booby traps and snipers.
Detailed planning is essential. Ideally, the leader of an assault team gathers all available intelligence about the crisis scene, targets, and innocents. The leader diagrams and discusses the proposed plan, outlining each of the team's actions and responsibilities, location, fields of fire, and special tasks (even to the point of a wall-by-wall and door-by-door layout of the objective, where available). Since the assault team usually already has specialized training, the operation is based on well-understood, pre-established standing operating procedure. When considerable preparation time is available, the team sometimes conducts step-by-step walk-through exercises on a mock-up that attempts to duplicate the target environment. Some units maintain permanent “shoot houses” or even airliner/ship mock-ups for providing more realistic practice for marksmanship and tactics.
One of the most dramatic examples of the value and power of this modern, psychological revolution in training can be seen in observations of the 1982 Falklands War. The superbly trained (i.e., “conditioned”) British forces were without air or artillery superiority and consistently outnumbered 3-to-1 while attacking the poorly trained but well-equipped and carefully dug-in Argentine defenders. Superior British firing rates (which were estimated to be well over 90%), resulting from modern training techniques, have been credited as a key factor in the series of British victories in that brief but bloody war. Any future army that attempts to go into battle without similar psychological preparation is likely to meet a fate similar to that of the Argentines. Combat veterans and tactical trainers understand that the human mind and body have predictable responses to surprise and lethal threats.
To give a further historical perspective, the U.S. Army greatly improved its firing rates between World War II and Vietnam using conditioning training. By 1946, it was estimated that the U.S. Army had a firing rate during World War II of 15-20% among American riflemen. The Human Resources Research Office of the U.S. Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training that replaced the old method of firing at bulls-eye targets with that of deeply ingrained “conditioning” using realistic, human-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of realistic powerful “operational conditioning” is the only technique that reliably influences the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. Just as fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire and repetitious “stimulus-response conditioning” in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations, the introduction of operational conditioning in modern combat training began to yield real results. The application and perfection of these basic conditioning techniques appear to have increased the rate of fire from near 20% in World War II to approximately 55% in Korea and around 95% in Vietnam. Similar high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of these modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s.
It is a requisite that a soldier train as he will fight. While modern operational urban training involves ballistic shoot house buildings that can be modified structurally (to include a wall, doorway, or staircase), or by situational placement singularly or collectively, there does not exist a practical means for providing a detailed immersive scenario system that allows for accurate re-creation of situational realism and reconfiguration to handle the multiple training scenarios required for modern operational urban training. Currently, shoot houses and other training structures have only rudimentary details besides physical architecture to immerse the trainee into the scenario. These structures are often blank walled or single tone in appearance with little resemblance in terms of visual detail to what will be found at the actual mission site, or in real life.
Training techniques and tools have evolved to keep pace with these new conflicts and threats. Urban operations training based on more realistic visual details and operational conditioning filter visual details and clues to make situationally-based tactical judgments. Among these are “friend or foe” targets and 360 degree simunition and live-fire shoot houses made of ballistic walls. These shoot houses with pop up and moving type targets have been made portable, reconfigurable, and collectively situated for multi-building or simulated city street training. In this field, entry, spotting and time-to-fire decisions are made in seconds. Thus, the judgments are intended to be based on visual details the trainee is deliberately looking for.
For these reasons, shoot houses and facilities are not as effective as they could be for preparing the trainee for filtering the plethora of visual details to make tactical judgments because not enough of the realistic visual details are included.